Update
March 28, 2005:RESULTS
OF PAW’S ONLINE SURVEY ON ETHICAL DILEMMASPAW
received 36 responses to its online survey of 14 hypothetical situations
that were used in research on “cognitive conflict and control in
moral judgment” by Princeton researchers Joshua D. Greene *02, Leigh
E. Nystrom, Andrew D. Engell, John M. Darley, and Jonathan D. Cohen. You
may recognize some of these examples as dilemmas posed by contemporary
moral philosophers at Princeton and elsewhere. The survey accompanied
the online contents of our special Jan. 26 issue on “Exploring Ethics.
”

Bioethics professor
Peter Singer and students in his freshman seminar on the bus to
Saint Peter’s University Hospital in nearby New Brunswick,
where they would observe tiny patients in the neonatal intensive-care
unit and discuss ethical questions of life and death. Nicholas Poulos
’08 is in the foreground.

Students in
Singer’s ethics seminar observe a child in the neonatal intensive-care
unit at Saint Peter’s University Hospital in New Brunswick,
where they discussed ethical dilemmas in the treatment of babies,
including whether and when it is appropriate to withdraw life support.

After taking
a class with Singer, Margo Lipman ’05 backpacked through Central
American, toting along “Writings on an Ethical Life”
and thinking about its implications for her own life.

(Photographs
by Ricardo Barros)

The
Ethicist Peter Singer and his students

By Christopher Shea ’91

By the time she was a senior, Lauren Turner ’04 was the self-possessed
president of the Princeton Bioethics Forum, an undergraduate group that
brings students and professors together to discuss issues like stem-cell
research, cloning, and the moral implications of genetic screening for
debilitating diseases. She could parse the distinction between life and
“personhood” with the best of them, or debate the merits of
consequentialism versus deontology. But back in 2001, Turner was just
a freshman with a vague interest in bioethics, watching Peter Singer in
action for the first time.

Then, 30 or so students were jammed into a seminar room designed for
half that many. They were there to see the man who had inspired severely
disabled members of Not Dead Yet to barricade administrators inside Nassau
Hall the previous year and who prompted Steve Forbes ’70 to noisily
snap shut his checkbook to Princeton. Singer, the Ira W. Decamp Profesor
of Bioethics, was talking about his views of the moral status of newborns
with catastrophic developmental problems, one of the issues that continually
get him into trouble with right-to-life groups. In the worst cases, doctors
often withdraw medical support and allow such babies to die, but Singer’s
question was: Might it not be more merciful to kill them?

Singer didn’t go at the issue directly. “He started out
by asking everyone who eats meat to raise their hands,” Turner recalls.
“We all had to list the reasons for him why it was ethically OK
for us to eat meat.” Tentatively at first but with building momentum,
the students proffered reasons for why killing animals was not immoral
— why it was different from what Singer proposed.

One student said: Animals are not self-conscious. But Singer pointed
out that infants aren’t conscious in the way adult humans are either.
Another suggested that animals aren’t part of the social contract,
because they lack the ability to reciprocate in ethical agreements. But
Singer pointed out that newborns can’t respond to ethical overtures
either. “We probably came up with 15 reasons, and reason by reason
he crossed them off the board, explaining why our logic failed,”
Turner recalls.

“I knew what he was doing, and it frustrated me that, as a freshman,
I couldn’t combat that,” she says. “I wanted to know
how to combat that — how he was able to use other people’s
logic to prove his own arguments. I find that absolutely brilliant.”
That year, she started showing up at Singer’s office hours to talk,
and, in turn, he started inviting her and a few other students to small
dinners at Prospect House whenever a bioethics luminary came through town.
“Those dinners were the best example of respectful intelligent dialogue
into which I’d ever come in contact,” Turner says. Though
she became an English major, she enrolled in his graduate seminar in bioethics.

Five years later — still far from a Singerian, philosophically
speaking (“I should note that I disagree with much of what he writes”)
— Turner is drafting policy proposals for the Bioethics Advisory
Commission of Singapore after winning a Henry Luce Fellowship and considering
graduate work in the field.

Evan Baehr ’05 also had a striking first encounter with Singer.
A self-described Christian conservative, president of the Princeton College
Republicans — and this fall a failed candidate for the Princeton
Borough Council — Baehr had a dim view of the man before he met
him. “Coming to Princeton as a freshman, I thought, ‘I can’t
believe this crazy person is teaching here,’” Baehr says now.
“I went into his class, ready to go to war. I wanted to hear the
controversy and have him be as monstrous as I heard he was.

“I guess I was let down and relieved at the same time,”
Baehr says. “He’s very humble and not nearly as controversial
as I thought he was going to be.”

Singer is by an order of magnitude the most famous professor at the
University Center for Human Values. He is also, it turns out, the one
professor who religiously (or irreligiously, in the case of the atheist
professor) attends meetings of the Human Values Forum, where undergraduates
convene to discuss everything from racial justice to stem-cell research
to the federal financing of the arts.

Baehr is an outspoken member of that group. And so it has come to pass
that one of Princeton’s most prominent student conservatives gets
along pretty well with the campus’s most famous apologist for infanticide.

When Peter Singer arrived in New Jersey five years ago, recruited from
Monash University in Australia, proctors had to escort him around campus
and yellow tape warded away visitors from 5 Ivy Lane, which houses his
office, out of fear he’d be attacked. Today, he’s simply part
of the Princeton fabric. “He’s been a tremendous force on
the campus,” says Lee Silver, a molecular biologist who teaches
bioethics in the Woodrow Wilson School. Debating the moral worldview of
President Bush with the Christian-right journalist Marvin Olasky on the
eve of the 2004 Presidential election; inspiring students to start a chapter
of UNICEF, a charitable organization that helps the world’s poorest;
commenting on the work of the visiting fellows in the Center for Human
Values, a group of young academics (including, this year, journalist Robert
Wright ’79) who come to Princeton to work on ethics-related projects
— Singer is far more than a big name who lectures, leads a precept
or two, then heads back to his books.

His encounter with the United States has also led to a widening of his
own academic interests, from bioethics to, first, a book on the ethics
of globalization, One World (2002), and then an analysis-cum-demolition
of the moral worldview of George W. Bush, The President of Good and
Evil (2004). (Singer arrived in the United States with a massive
manuscript recounting the life of his grandfather, David Oppenheim, a
classics scholar who perished in the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt.
After much whittling down, it was published in 2003 as Pushing Time
Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna. A New
York Times reviewer said the book’s “calm, understated
prose” and power reminded her of the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro.)

Just as he has become a fixture at Princeton and on the American political
scene, however, Singer is taking an antipodean step away: Starting this
year, he will teach at Princeton only half-time, spending each spring
semester back in his native Australia, where he has three grown daughters.
“I love Princeton and I really enjoy my work here,” Singer
says, sitting in his airy office. “But on the other hand I love
my children and my wife feels the same — and we don’t want
to feel that we hardly ever see them.”

One suspects that there are morally traditionalist Princeton alumni
who won’t shed a tear to hear that Singer’s time with students
will be cut in half. But to focus on the radical places his philosophy
sometimes leads him — “over a cliff,” as the New
Yorker once put it — misses what he is like as a teacher and
campus presence, many students say.

Singer has written or edited at least 30 books – most famously
Animal Liberation, a bible of the animal rights movement published
in 1975 — and scores of articles, but he is best known for two propositions.
The first is that we — we humans — place too much emphasis
on protecting human life and too little on preventing suffering among
both human and nonhuman creatures. This proposition has two corollaries:
Our treatment of animals is often outrageous, since animals can know fear
and terror. And our respect for human embryos and fetuses (and sometimes
even newborns) borders on the fetishistic, since they cannot.

In an introduction to the essay collection Singer and his Critics
(1999), Dale Jamieson, a visiting professor in the Center for Human Values
this year, puts the point somewhat glibly: “The character of Singer’s
view can be brought out by saying that generally he thinks that you are
more likely to do something wrong by killing a healthy pig rather than
your severely handicapped infant; and if you are choosing between an early
abortion and killing an adult cow, you should probably have the abortion.”

Singer also attempts to undermine the salience of physical distance
and community in moral judgments. No doubt you think it would be outrageous
to stroll past a child drowning in the fountain outside Robertson Hall.
But Singer points out that writing a check to Oxfam or UNICEF causes just
as little inconvenience for most Americans as wading into that fountain
— and just as directly saves lives. He wants to challenge the intuition
that saving a child you can see is morally imperative, while saving the
one you can’t is an option to be put off until after you’ve
bought the Lexus.

Singer doesn’t claim to be neutral when he teaches Princeton students.
“I think for me to pretend that I was neutral would somehow imply
that I don’t think that careful reasoning and argument about a particular
moral issue is more likely to lead to one outcome than the other,”
he says. “That’s not what I think.”

Yet he does not see his classroom role as that of advocate, especially
since few Princeton students arrive on campus with experience in making
ethical arguments. “I think they come into my class knowing that
there are all of these ethical issues about abortion, or how much we should
help the poor, or questions about war or euthanasia or stem cells, the
environment, the treatment of animals,” he says. “But they
tend to say, ‘Well, this is my opinion. That’s your opinion.
And I respect your opinion.’ They tend to think there is not much
that you can do after that.

“I want to show them that that is not the case. You can demand
reasons for positions and you can then examine those reasons. And some
positions turn out to be defensible and some turn out not to be defensible.
Or they turn out to have implications that you find unacceptable.”
(Michael A. Smith, a new hire in the philosophy department, says Singer
encouraged him to ensure that the department regularly offered a course
exploring various philosophical approaches to ethics — utilitarianism,
Kantian deontology, virtue ethics, and the like — so students would
be better prepared for Singer’s upper-level Practical Ethics. Smith
taught such a course last semester and intends to push for its being offered
each year.)

Singer’s personal example is also appealing to a certain type
of student. He is a vegetarian of near-vegan strictness who also donates
roughly 20 percent of his income to charity (and he is quick to concede
his philosophy suggests he should give more). Talk to Singer’s former
students and you soon hear anecdotes of vegetarian conversions and spikes,
not always sustained, in charitable giving. “He definitely walks
the talk, even if you don’t agree with everything he says,”
says Page Dykstra, a

junior and president of the Human Values Forum.

On a recent Tuesday night, 15 students in Singer’s freshman seminar,
Ethical Choices, trickle into a small classroom in Wilson College’s
Wilcox Hall. Then Singer himself arrives, a trim man of 58 — he
shares President Bush’s date of birth — balding but with a
crown of graying hair worn in classic professorial anti-style.

Discussing a visit by Zell Kravinsky the previous week is the first
order of business. Kravinsky is a one-time Philadelphia real-estate mogul
recently profiled in the New Yorker because of his prodigious
— some, including his wife, might say “borderline insane”
— charitable impulses. Kravinsky made $45 million buying and selling
buildings, then gave

all but a tiny sliver of it away. Then, racked that he still

wasn’t doing enough for humanity, he donated a kidney at Philadelphia’s
Albert Einstein Medical Center, over his wife’s objections —
a rare case of an “undirected donation.” The organ, as Kravinsky
had hoped, went to a poor African-American recipient who would have died
without it.

More of a Singerian than Singer, Kravinsky goes so far as to say people
who do not donate their “extra” kidneys are no different from
murderers, since the operation carries no worse than a one-in-4,000 risk
of death of the donor.

The students aren’t buying Kravinsky’s philosophy of radical
selflessness. “I don’t see how our economic system could exist
if everyone only helped people besides themselves,” says Lon Johnson
’08. Others point out that Kravinsky could save more lives by making
more money in real estate and financing

medical research.

Kravinsky had told the class he would consider donating his lone remaining
kidney if, say, a brilliant cancer researcher with the potential to save
thousands of lives needed one, and several students seize on that admission
as exposing the fatal flaw in his worldview. “If you only consider
ratios,” asks Sam Fallon ’08, “wouldn’t that imply
that if you kill 10 people to save 80, you should do it? And if you don’t
believe that would be right, doesn’t that imply that something else
is more important than ratios – like human individuality?”

Singer, in a calm baritone, brings the argument back to the case at
hand: Kravinsky saved a life by taking a one-in-4,000 chance he himself
would die. What’s wrong with that?

“I don’t think my second kidney belongs to me,” says
Lauren Tracey ’08. She says it belongs to her brother, and then
to her parents, in case they should ever need it. In his own writings,
Singer usually challenges this kind of moral favoritism, but he lets it
go. Others ask: Should the standard of ethical behavior really be something
virtually no one will achieve? After all, the self-abnegating Kravinsky
still sees himself as falling far short of the ideal. (Jesus’ injunction
to give away all of one’s possessions and live with the poor, much
cited and rarely followed, comes to mind.)

After a break, the class comes back to discuss short literary excerpts
— bits of Shakespeare, James Baldwin, and Vikram Seth, among others
— that illustrate ethical conundrums involving sex and marriage.
Is homosexual sex wrong? In choosing a spouse, is it reasonable to choose
one’s family’s preferences and stability over passion?

Students often come out of Singer’s freshman seminars and Practical
Ethics inclined to make changes in their lives. Field Kallop ’04
and Melanie Wachtell ’04, for example, became vegetarians —
Singer’s simple argument is that by doing so one can reduce suffering,
particularly in factory farms, at little personal cost — but more
significantly, perhaps, they also formed a campus chapter of UNICEF. “We
had lunch with him and he said he would give a big speech to kick off
the group,” says Wachtell, now at Stanford Law School.

Singer did just that, in McCosh 10, and by the time Kallop and Wachtell
graduated, the group was bringing in $6,000 a year, the most of any of
UNICEF’s 65 American campus chapters.

Margo Lipman ’05, meanwhile, jokes that Singer was “my first
intellectual crush.” When she took time off from Prince-ton not
long after taking Practical Ethics, and backpacked through Central America,
she toted along Singer’s book Writings on an Ethical Life —
in hardback. “I was in a developing country” — Belize,
at first — “and I come from a family of relative wealth. Upper-middle
class. Middle class by Princeton standards. I asked myself, ‘How
ethical am I? How often do I take ethics into account in my everyday life?’
Not so much.”

Now she is looking at graduate programs in agriculture and international
development, and considering a career working for nongovernmental organizations,
perhaps in Africa. “Everybody likes to think, ‘I’m an
ethical person,’ but self-interest enters into the equation in arbitrary
ways,” she says. “What’s important in Singer’s
philosophy — and now mine — is the lack of boundaries,”
Lipman adds. “It’s as bad to have someone dying of hunger
in Africa as here.”

For Kai Chan *03, who got his Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology,
the ethical self-examination prompted by working with Singer “was
actually debilitating, in a sense.” Chan began to give 30 percent
of his stipend to charity and grew obsessed about the ethics of each and
every ex-penditure of money and energy. “That kind of an ethical
awakening — the striving for selflessness — can really undermine
the confidence and healthy sense of ego that is so necessary to achieve
great things,” he says. He has since backed off a bit — more
volunteering, less cash — but still says Singer had “a huge
impact on my life.” His work with Singer also led to the publication
of two highly technical essays in The Journal of Applied Philosophy on
our duties to future generations.

To say the least, not everyone

buys the notion of Peter-Singer-as-secular-saint. Four years ago, after
a Daily Princetonian headline dubbed him Princeton’s “Moral
Mentor,” Matthew O’Brien ’03 retorted in a letter to
the editor: “Caring for the poor and rejecting materialism is nothing
new. It’s been part of Christianity for the past 2,000 years.”
And he continued: “What’s the result of Christian ethics without
God? It’s the darker side of Singer – abortion, infanticide,
and euthanasia.”

In a recent profile in World, an evangelical Christian newsmagazine,
Marvin Olasky, its editor, focused only on this “darker” side,
holding Singer up as emblematic of “blue state” values. Singer
told Olasky he thought necrophilia and bestiality were no doubt unfulfilling,
but “not wrong inherently,” so long as pain wasn’t inflicted
on another being. And he defended his argument that it might be morally
acceptable to kill painlessly a 1-year-old with severe disabilities, though
he said he would prefer it if the issue were “raised as soon as
possible after birth.”

Some student fans point out that there are alternatives to Singer’s
ethics classes, ranging from former president Harold Shapiro *64’s
Bioethics and Public Policy to religion professor Eric Gregory’s
Christian Ethics and Modern Society. Several student groups have tried
to get Singer together on stage with Robert George, the conservative,
anti-abortion professor who teaches popular courses on the Constitution
and civil liberties, but George has so far declined. “I regret that
he’s not prepared to do that,” Singer says. (George, who otherwise
declined to be interviewed for this article, responded via e-mail that
he dislikes “gladiatorial” encounters between scholarly opponents,
which, he said, “do nothing to enhance understanding.” But
he said he has discussed with Singer the possibility of co-teaching a
seminar.) Other professors express some frustration that Princeton students
sometimes seem to think ethics comes down to a choice between Singer and
George — “as if there were a simple choice to be made between
secular utilitarianism and natural law conservatism,” as religion
professor Jeffrey Stout *76 puts it.

“I don’t agree with either of these ‘isms,’”
says Stout, who teaches a seminar called Religious Perspectives on Ethics,
“so I find it unfortunate when things are framed in this way.”

Singer accepted Princeton’s offer of a job because he wanted to
join the conversation about ethics in the United States, and in this he
has undoubtedly succeeded. Since his arrival, the New York Times Magazine
alone has run three major articles either by him or about him —
the most memorable being a first-person piece by Harriet McBryde Johnson,
a quadriplegic and disabled-rights activist whom Singer invited into his
Practical Ethics class to explain why she thought his views on the killing
of disabled infants were so horrifying. “Singer is easy to talk
to, good company,” she wrote, recounting her time on the campus.
“Too bad he sees lives like mine as avoidable mistakes.” Joshua
Geltzer ’05, a Woodrow Wilson School major and winner of this year’s
Class of 1939 Princeton Scholar Prize and a Marshall Scholarship, calls
the exchange between Singer and Johnson “one of the best academic
experiences I’ve had at Princeton.”

Singer’s time in the States has also changed his work. Sitting
in on discussions of global warming in the Woodrow Wilson School led directly
to One World, his recent book on the ethics of globalization,
he says. Those discussions were rife with policy and politics, but Singer
explains, “I think that they completely skated over the fact that
there’s a real ethical question about the United States, with 5
percent of the world’s population, using 30 percent of the atmosphere’s
capacity to absorb waste gases.”

“Essentially,” he says, “I see it as one of the wealthiest
nations in the world taking from other nations what it has no right to
take.”

Given the tenor of Singer writings, one might expect a touch of disdain
toward Princeton’s famously wealthy, arguably pampered student body.
But if it’s there, he keeps it well hidden. The students in his
classes “show quite a lot of idealism, probably more so than you’d
find in Australia or Europe.” Even a mention of the Prospect Street
scene fails to elicit any indignation: “We all partied a bit in
college, I guess.”

He may simply have mellowed with age: His activism is certainly less
outré than it used to be. “He hasn’t put himself in
a giant chicken coop in Times Square, which is something he did in Australia,”
says Dale Jamieson, a longtime friend.

Still, there remains something inescapably paradoxical about Singer’s
presence at Princeton. Here, after all, is the man who believes that excess
wealth should be donated to the poor — teaching at a university
that sits atop a $9.9-billion endowment.

Indeed, the Rutgers philosopher Colin McGinn once delivered what he
thought was a death blow against Singer’s conception of our ethical
obligations. If humans ought to forswear all luxuries in favor of helping
the needy, McGinn wrote, not only would theaters and museums and orchestras
disappear, but so would many forms of education: It would be impossible
to justify the life of reading and reflection required to become a philosophy
professor. Singer’s philosophy of charity, in sum, was not only
misguided but also self-annihilating.

Asked about that argument in his Ivy Lane office, Singer doesn’t
try to refute McGinn: He says he’s prepared to “bite the bullet.”
With 1.2 billion humans living on the brink of starvation, this philosophy
professor says: “Perhaps being a philosophy professor is a luxury
we should not have too much of.”

Christopher Shea ’91 writes a column for the Boston Globe
Ideas section and has written for the Washington Post Magazine,
the New York Times Magazine, and Lingua Franca.